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Hi,
Since the upgrade to Catalina I've been having a lot of issues with my iMac.
However, the most annoying one is not being able to restart.
When I try, all apps shut down and so does my finder, but then nothing happens.
Just an empty desktop screen.
I reinstalled Catalina and updated to the newest version, yet nothing seems to help.
Here is my system log from around the time I tried to restart.
Hope someone has an idea..
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Hello Benny Arts,
Thank you for posting in the Apple Support Communities. I understand that your iMac won't shut down as expected, and that updating and reinstalling macOS Catalina didn't help. I'd love to assist you.
For this issue, I suggest taking the steps in the section, "Turn off (shut down) your Mac" in the support article below:
How to turn your Mac on or off
From there, double check your Energy Saver settings to be sure that nothing is preventing it from powering off:
Change Energy Saver preferences on Mac
Lastly, you can try booting into safe mode, then checking to see if it'll power off that way:
Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac
I hope this information is useful. Kind regards.
Hello Benny Arts,
Thank you for posting in the Apple Support Communities. I understand that your iMac won't shut down as expected, and that updating and reinstalling macOS Catalina didn't help. I'd love to assist you.
For this issue, I suggest taking the steps in the section, "Turn off (shut down) your Mac" in the support article below:
How to turn your Mac on or off
From there, double check your Energy Saver settings to be sure that nothing is preventing it from powering off:
Change Energy Saver preferences on Mac
Lastly, you can try booting into safe mode, then checking to see if it'll power off that way:
Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac
I hope this information is useful. Kind regards.
Hi, did the above but nothing seemed to help.
I can restart in safe mode but when I reboot again into normal mode, the problem persists.
I also reset the NVRAM, PRAM and SMC but nothing helped.
Here is the last crash report after trying to restart:
Benny Arts,
Thanks for getting back to us after taking those steps. Since it sounds like the issue doesn't happen in safe mode, you might have incompatible login items. From here, I recommend booting into safe mode again, then following the steps in the section, "Test your login items" here:
If your Mac has a blue screen or other startup problems
Have a great rest of your day.
I don't know if this will solve your problem, but in the past, I found that my Macs OS wouldn't complete the start up process after an upgrade because it for some reason decided it didn't like one of the connections of my peripherals. When I disconnected them all, it started just fine. By restarting and connecting each peripheral one at a time I found which connection it was. It was the mouse being connected to my keyboard. I then connected the mouse into a different USB port and all was well. Give it a try and see what happens. And good luck.
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for helping.
I did what you suggested but the problem persists.
I have had the exact same problem since installing Catalina. Nothing I have tried has successfully addressed this annoying issue.
Thanks. I’ll give that a try!
Update:
I downgraded to Mojave and everything worked great again.
Too bad this was such a hustle to do and had to be done to solve this issue.
See https://appletoolbox.com/mac-will-not-shut-fix/.
Reset SMC + reset NVRAM will probably solve the issue.
iMac wont restart since Catalina
